281: Stop Trying To Convince Yourself

Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 281 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/281.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover.

Before we get started with today’s episode, there’s something that I want to mention, and it links into the fact that I haven’t put an episode out for the last couple of weeks, because I’ve actually been working on something. This week I put out a new mini course. It’s a free mini course that you can get access to, and the name of the mini course is ‘The First 5 Steps in Recovery’.

I wanted to create this mini course because I see so many people, and so many people reach out to me and are really struggling to get started with recovery, and to really know what to do to build some momentum or how to get started. This can be true for people who truly are at the very beginning of their eating disorder recovery and this is their first attempt at getting on the road to recovery, but equally, it’s true for people who’ve been dealing with this for a really long time. I’m working with many people who’ve been struggling with eating disorders for decades, and yet it feels like they’re still at the starting place and still figuring out how to make those first steps.

As part of the mini course, I share a framework that I use when I’m thinking about recovery to really explain what eating disorder recovery is really about, and then I walk through how to do that. I explain the first 5 steps to take as part of this, and I talk about why each of those steps are important and then how to actually do each of those steps.

As part of it, there are handouts, there are writing exercises, so there’s a lot of reflection and a lot of action-taking that is then suggested as part of it. I think one of the big issues for so many people in recovery is that there’s a lot of consuming of information. There’s listening to podcasts like this, there’s watching YouTube videos, there’s reading books, there’s accumulating lots of information, but it’s not actually translating into action-taking. So the purpose of the mini course was, yes, I want to give some information and some explanation so you understand why, but I then want you to take action. Because if it’s only about information, it doesn’t get you anywhere. So it’s very practical in that sense of ‘here is why and now here is what to do’.

There’s 13 videos as part of the mini course, and it walks you through everything, and then there’s even some additional ideas of things that you can be doing either alongside or once you’ve started doing those first 5 steps.

So if you are interested, I will put a link to the sign-up for that in the show notes. The show note link, again, is www.seven-health.com/281. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. It’s completely free. You could also email info@seven-health.com, and if you then include the word ‘mini course’, I will be able to email the link over to you so you can get signed up.

But so far, the feedback has been incredible. I’m really pleased with, one, what I’ve created; I feel really good about it. I think it is really great information and really helpful. And two, I’ve had lots of feedback already from people who’ve signed up, who’ve already started getting going with it. So I would love you to be able to do the same. Again, that’s in the show notes or you can email info@seven-health.com with the word ‘mini course’ and I’ll get that sent over to you.

00:04:38

Stop trying to convince yourself

So, on with today’s show. Today it’s another one of these solo episodes where I’m talking about a particular topic. The topic I’ve picked, I picked because in the last couple of weeks it’s something that’s come up again and again with clients I’m working with. So I thought this would be a good thing to cover as part of the show.

I’m titling this one ‘Stop Trying to Convince Yourself’. What I mean by that title is that so often in recovery, there is this attempt to try and convince yourself before taking an action that this is the absolute right thing to be doing – that “I want to be able to tell myself all of the reasons why this is the right thing to do and then truly feel 100% confident in my bones that this is the right decision to be making.” The reality is, that’s never going to happen. There are going to be lots of unhelpful thoughts and feelings and sensations that arise that mean that there is never going to be this 100% confidence and conviction.

The trap that I see people falling into is that there is this belief that “I can get there, I just need to do more convincing, so I’m going to try and come up with more reasons why this is the right thing to do” or “Maybe this isn’t the right thing to do and I need to explore some other option that could then be the right thing to do.” It then becomes this saga of sorts where there’s this constant trying to come up with this other alternative way of doing this to see then if I feel confident with it. The reality is, as I said, that’s just not going to happen.

Let me use an example to give a little bit of clarity to this. For example, let’s say there’s a recognition that I need to increase the size of my breakfast, or there’s a healthy part of you that recognises “I need to increase the size of my breakfast”, and then it as it comes closer to actually doing that, there’s all these thoughts that start to arise about “Do I really need to increase the size of my breakfast? What if I’m increasing the size of my breakfast but I should actually be increasing more of the protein and less of the carbohydrates? What’s the healthiest way to increase the size of my breakfast?” All of these different thoughts that then come up that get in the way of actually just taking the action because there’s all of these thoughts that make you unsure about what is the ‘correct’ way of being able to do this.

00:07:57

You are not your thoughts

One of the things I focus on so much with clients is that you are not your thoughts. Your mind generates your thoughts, and then you become aware of those thoughts. They enter into your consciousness and then you become aware of them. As a way of experiencing it, it feels like it’s your thoughts. It feels like you are the one that is generating them, but in fact, it’s not you; it is your mind, and you are just the witness to them.

One way that I’ll often demonstrate this with clients – and we can do it now – is I want you to think of a city in the world. Think of any city in the world. What is the city that came to mind? Okay. Why did that city come to mind? There are, I would imagine, hundreds of cities that you know of. Why was it that that thought came to mind?

There can be explanations that you can come up with. It could be Paris came to mind, and the reason Paris came to mind was I was looking at going on a holiday to Paris, so it’s very front of mind. But even if that is true, there are many other cities that could’ve come to mind. I’m assuming you know of the city of London or you know of the city of Sydney or you know of the city of New York. Why were they the ones that didn’t come to mind?

The answer is that you are not in control of those thoughts. There is some prompt, like I just asked ‘think of a city’, and your mind does that of its own accord. You don’t have control over the fact that it picked one thing over another; it just happened. And again, if I keep asking you to think of cities, there’ll be lots of cities that keep coming to mind, and maybe at some point you stop being able to even think of them. But if I ask you, “Do you know of Los Angeles?” or “Do you know of Berlin?”, you’ll say, “Yes, I do, but they just didn’t come to me in that moment.”

This is the same here. You’re having an experience where you’re getting closer to breakfast and you said “I’m going to do this thing connected to my breakfast” or “I’ve been contemplating doing this thing connected to my breakfast”, and that situation then triggers certain thoughts. These aren’t your thoughts; they’re not thoughts that you created. They’re just thoughts that have come to mind.

00:11:09

The problem with the ‘counterthought’ approach

One of the things that people are often taught with certain thoughts that come to mind, especially thoughts that are unhelpful, is trying to think of a counterthought, trying to think of a different thought. I think this comes from CBT. There’s lots of different ways that people do CBT, but I think there is this idea that you’ve had this unhelpful thought; why don’t you just think of a more helpful thought?

While on the surface, that seems like a really good idea, what it often leads to is then you getting into this discussion or even an argument with all of these thoughts. Your mind generates this thought and then you try and come up with this other thought to counter that example, and then there’s another thought that gets generated and you come up with another thought. It then just becomes this endless arms race of you trying to come up with more and more better thoughts while your mind is continuing to generate other thoughts. At no point do you reach a place where you’re like, “I won this round. I finally came up with a better thought.” All that happens is it leads to more rumination, it leads to more confusion, more overwhelm, more feeling unsure about your decision.

What it also does is legitimises those thoughts. It says that these thoughts are worth getting into a conversation with. There’s this idea of ‘don’t negotiate with a terrorist’, and I think this is very true within eating disorder recovery. The more you try and get into a negotiation, the more the action just won’t happen. It just all fizzes out and it feels too much and ‘this is too hard’, and it’s because there was that negotiation process.

00:13:26

Why your mind generates unhelpful thoughts

I want to also say that it makes complete sense that your mind is generating these kind of thoughts. For your body and your nervous system, they have come to associate eating with fear, or taking time off exercise with a threat. So there is this neuroception, is how it’s labelled, that when this thing is about to occur or I am noticing this thing is going to occur, this is the response that the nervous system has. And it’s happening at a subconscious level. You’re not consciously aware of it; it just takes your state to that place.

In a sense, you’re having these thoughts and these feelings because your mind is trying to keep you safe. It believes in that moment that this is something you should be afraid of, and it’s then reminding you of that.

So when that occurs, you can remember that your mind is trying to keep you safe in the way that it knows best, but that isn’t what you need to do right now. You can still thank your mind for generating this thought, “and I don’t need to get into a negotiation with you, and I don’t need to convince you why you’re wrong. I can just say, ‘Hey, thank you for that thought and I’m still going to move on with what I need to do’.”

00:15:10

Questions to ask yourself to gain clarity

One of the ways that you can start to move away from this kind of negotiation is to, in a sense, move a level up, and to really understand, “Why am I doing this? What is the bigger picture of why I’m doing this?” We can come at this from different kinds of angles, but there’s lots of questions that you can ask yourself. These can actually make really great journaling prompts, and I’ll often get clients to journal on this stuff, and have as a point of record that they can come back to, that they reread on a daily basis to really remind themselves of ‘why I’m doing what I’m doing’.

Let me run through some different questions that can be useful as part of this journaling.

How would I act differently if painful thoughts and feelings were no longer an obstacle?

What projects or activities would I start or continue if my time and energy weren’t consumed by troublesome emotions? Or what activities would I stop if I didn’t feel compelled to do them by troublesome emotions?

What would I do if fear was no longer an issue?

What would I attempt if thoughts of failure didn’t deter me?

More generally, how would I like to be around food?

What events or situations are missing from my life that I would like to have in my life?

What events or situations are happening and I wish they weren’t occurring?

Another one is framing it so that this is about someone else. If this was for a friend:

If a friend was in this situation, what advice would I have for them? Or, bigger picture, what would I like to see them be able to do? What would I like to see them no longer be afraid of? What would I like to imagine that they’re able to do, and do in a way that feels easy and natural?

Use these kinds of questions to create clarity or create a vision of ‘this is where I want to get to’. Then the goals that you’re setting are in service of getting you to that place. If we come back to the having a bigger breakfast example, it’s then in service of getting to that place. When your mind starts generating lots of unhelpful thoughts and you’re feeling the pull to start to come up with counterarguments or counterexamples, it can be much more “Hey, let me go and read these ideas connected to where I want to get to or what I would like to do if there was no fear” and using that as a way of changing what you’re focusing on in that moment.

00:19:17

Dealing with the uncomfortableness of recovery

I want to say this – and I’ve kind of already said it, but I think part of this as well is managing expectations. The expectation should be that this will feel uncomfortable. It should be that it feels challenging to make this change. That’s what’s normal, given the fact that you’re in recovery from an eating disorder. So it’s unlikely that you are going to be excited about the goal as you get closer and closer to the fact that you actually have to do this thing. As you get further along in recovery, definitely you can become more and more excited, but in the beginning stages, it’s going to feel more uncomfortable.

Or there could be some excitement or some positive emotion that is connected to this, or some looking forward to the pleasure of eating this particular food that you haven’t eaten for a long time, but it’s rare that that will then be that one clean emotion. It’s normally that there’s this desire and this excitement of being able to eat that that’s then coupled with guilt about the fact that you desire that food, or guilt about the fact that you need that many calories.

So it’s likely, and you should expect, that it’s going to feel uncomfortable and that you’re going to feel unsure about this. That shouldn’t be a barrier to making the change, because you can still feel uncomfortable and then do the thing. The more there is this trying to convince yourself to, in a sense, eradicate all of those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings so that you can be 100% behind making this choice, that just doesn’t really happen.

One of the mantras that many of my clients use connected to this is ‘eat first, think later’. There is this realisation, and it happens at different stages with different clients, but this realisation that “The more I try and think about this, the more I’m allowing space for all of these unhelpful thoughts to arise and to get in the way and to make it more challenging for me to actually do the thing that I need to do. The more I’m able to just make a snap decision and do the thing, or I set this goal and when it comes time to do the thing, I just do it, that is actually way easier.”

It sounds on the surface to be counterintuitive because it feels like if I can talk my way into it, if I can explain all the reasons, that’s going to make it easier, and it just really isn’t. So at some point, with every client who really starts making progress, it’s this realisation that “I need to eat first and think later” or “I need to take action and then think later. There needs to be the convincing part just ceases, because the more I try and do that, the less action I actually take.”

So that is it for this episode. As I said, this is something that’s been coming up a lot with clients I’m working with, so I wanted to share it with you. I really do believe that the more you can move away from this trying to convince yourself and take action even when it is uncomfortable, it’s really the way forward, because there is no other way to recover. There is no way to feel comfortable and confident and recover. These are attributes that show up after the fact, not beforehand or during. So moving away from trying to convince yourself is really the way forward with recovery.

As I mentioned at the top, I now have this new mini course that you can get access to for free. You can do that by going to the show notes, which is www.seven-health.com/281, or you can send an email to info@seven-health.com and put the word ‘mini course’ in the subject line and I’ll get that sent out to you.

That is it for this week’s show. I’ll catch you again soon.

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